This report is the first to estimate employment effects of looming American protectionism under US president Trump. We study the economic impact of a tightening of US trade policy on Belgium and on every EU member state, which we refer to as “America First” or “Trumpit” (like...

In the global recession of 2009, exports declined precipitously in many countries. We illustrate with firm-level data for Belgium and Peru that the decline was very sudden and almost entirely due to lower export sales by existing exporters. After the recession, exports rebounded almost equally...

Little is known about the empirical determinants of state formation and dissolution, despite a rich theoretical literature on the subject. This paper attempts to fill that gap by treating the dissolution of the Soviet Union as a historical experiment in state breakup. I exploit regional...

Despite a rich theoretical literature on regional (in)stability, little is known about its empirical validity. This paper presents simulated experimental findings on spatial heterogeneity in regional (in)stability across 264 regions belonging to 26 European countries. To do so, it develops a...

We assess a country's influence on decision-making in the EU Council of Ministers not merely on the basis of the number of its votes, but based on a more refined measure that takes into account the voting behavior of other countries. A country that is likely to receive support from other...

Reynaerts and Vanschoonbeek (2016) propose a semi-parametric procedure to estimate the economic impact of secession, finding empirical evidence that declaring independence significantly lowered per capita GDP in newly formed states. To demonstrate that these findings appear to hold irrespective...

Reynaerts and Vanschoonbeek (2016) propose a semi-parametric procedure to estimate the economic impact of secession, finding empirical evidence that declaring independence significantly lowered per capita GDP in newly formed states. To demonstrate that these findings appear to hold irrespective...

We investigate if a more populous or fragmented executive or legislative increases public spending, an effect known as “the Law of 1/n”. We test this for the supra-local governments of Belgium. On the basis of our dataset – including rather few “cross-sections” as well as rather few...

This paper uses firm level data to analyze the regional competitiveness of two federal Euro area countries, Belgium and Germany. Competitiveness is defined as the labor cost per unit of output and hence takes into account productivity differences. Analyzing regional competitiveness is important...

This paper uses data from the Community Innovation Survey for Belgium to evaluate to what extent firms located in sectors and regions characterized by high employment concentration (clusters) innovate more. We analyze the innovative performance of Belgian firms in the year 2004 and relate it to...